


The Beginning of Afterwards

by Masu_Trout



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulbonds, Emotional Hurt, F/F, Fix-It, Post-Sacrifice Arcadia Bay Ending, Soul Bond, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 20:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11089110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: The destruction of Arcadia Bay changes them both in ways they never expected. Chloe wants to go back, Max doesn't know if she can, and neither of them quite know how to deal with the strange connection that's joining them together.





	The Beginning of Afterwards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prosodiical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prosodiical/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this, prosodiical! I loved your prompts, and I hope I was able to do them some justice.

Five days after the storm, Chloe gouged her arm on a can opener. 

They'd run out of supplies approximately two hours after leaving the wreckage of everything they knew, and it wasn't like they could just drive to the next town over and buy more. (Surprise, it turned out that a storm of overwhelming destruction actually _destroyed things_ , and most every place in a two hour radius had been out of power or worse.) The best they could do was scavenged supplies: canned food and crappy camping gear pulled from someone's basement, gas stolen from the shell of a relatively intact garage. It was enough. Neither of them could stand the thought of being around strangers, of pretending things were normal.

The rebound was the first thing that registered, before even the sound of Chloe's hissed-out gasp of pain or the sight of blood welling up through the skin. The phantom pain slammed into Max's mind, bright and burning, and before she could even stop to _think_ she was already in motion. 

Pulling back time was the easiest thing in the world. The seconds slid backwards without so much as a conscious thought; in front of her, Chloe raised one arm, her expression of pain and shock leveling out into tired indifference as blood rushed back into the wound and her skin sealed shut behind it.

Max dropped her control the moment she realized what she'd done. Fucking with time was _dangerous_. She'd promised Chloe she wouldn't anymore, that there'd never be anything like that storm again. What did it say about her that she couldn't even keep her word for five days?

“Shit,” she said, “Chloe, I'm sorry—”

Chloe glared up at her, scowling through the fringe of her grease-slick hair, and said, “Max, you _said_ —”

Silence fell over their little campground. For a moment, they could only stare at each other. Finally, Chloe said, “You just turned back time.”

“Yes,” Max said. Her pulse was thrumming with something that felt terrifyingly like hope. 

Chloe had felt the echo of the pain, Max told herself, or else she'd figured Max's mistake out from the look on her face. There was no way she could have actually—no possible chance—

“Because I sliced my palm. I was trying to get the can open, and I got impatient.” Chloe laughed, high and wild. “I remember getting so fucking fed up and just…” She looked down at her palms, then up at Max. “I _remember_ it.”

“I don't... how?” 

“I think we both know how.” Chloe held her now-whole wrist up and let the flickering fire play off the strange mark there.

There were a whole lot of stories out there about soulbonding, TV shows and blockbuster movies and books in every conceivable genre, and they all seemed to have some sort of _idea_ about what a mark should look like. Romances loved heart-shaped marks (no points for creativity there), and big-budget shows tended to go for intricate shapes that looked more like tattoos then real marks. Max's personal favorites had always been the horror takes; there was an Edgar Allen Poe story featuring a soulbond mark in the shape of a screaming face that had given her nightmares for weeks after she first read it as a kid.

The mark they shared, though, didn't resemble anything other than a particularly blobby blob. It was an odd sort of blueish-purple color, like a fresh bruise, but other than that it could easily be mistaken for a birthmark.

Neither of them had ever meant for it to happen. Max wasn't some kind of ridiculous romantic, and she suspected Chloe would have laughed at the very idea. When the storm hit she'd reached out to Chloe, determined to save her (to hold her) even if it tore the world apart, and they'd just… connected.

Soulbonds were a rare, rare thing. Maybe Max's weird time powers had made it more likely, or maybe she'd just been _that_ desperate not to watch Chloe die again. 

And now—and now this. One more complication to add to the mess their lives had become.

“What, you think my time powers are connected to soulbonding somehow?” 

Chloe curled her hand into a fist, looking down at the mark thoughtfully. “I think… I think that when you travel, it's your soul that goes back, not your body. And now our souls are tied together. It's hella weird, but it's the only thing I can think of that makes sense.” 

“Huh,” Max said. “So…”

“So? _So?_ This changes everything. We have to test this.”

The words spilled from Max's mouth before her brain could catch up to her tongue: “no.”

“Max, what?” Chloe was staring at her now, caught somewhere between anger and open-mouthed shock. “Do you get what this means?”

“It means I could make everything worse! It means I could…” 

Chloe dead on the bathroom floor, Kate falling from the roof as rain poured down around them, Chloe dying slowly in a wheelchair, Victoria bound and gagged and terrified, Chloe with a bullet through her head. _It means I could fail. Again._

“...It means we need to think this through,” she finished after a moment. “Carefully.”

Chloe turned away, clutching at the soul mark like it was burning her. “It freaks you out that bad? Just the thought of going back?”

Max resisted the urge to smack herself once she realized; of _course_ Chloe had felt the backlash from that little freakout. This was all so new to her—she had no idea how to reel in her emotions or keep from overwhelming the bond with every little moment of insecurity or despair. 

It was stupid of her. She needed to be better than this.

“It's not that bad,” Max muttered. “I'm just a worrywart.”

“Uh-uh.” Chloe was still staring at her suspiciously, but at least the hot anger had faded from her eyes. She reached out—slowly, carefully—and took Max's hand in hers. “Look, we're not going to be stupid about this, okay? You're right. We'll go slow, keep things careful.” She brushed the pad of her thumb against Max's mark as she said, “I won't leave you. No matter what. _Partners_.”

Partners in crime, partners in time. The words still held as true—Max just wished they could still be as carefree as when they'd first said them only days ago. Back then, her powers had still felt like a gift. A force for good. 

Maybe they could be again. Max closed her eyes and tried not to think of the storm.

\--

They slept in the backseat of Chloe's car. There was a tent among their gear, but neither of them knew how to pitch it and anyway the dinged up old rustbucket just felt _safer_. It smelled just the same as it always had, like pot and old clothes and salt, and the cracked upholstery was oddly comfortable.

The first night they'd tried to stay as far apart as possible from each other (which was, as it turned out, not very far at all in a car as small as this). The connection between them was too new, too fresh, and it was too much to process on top of the horrors they'd already seen that day. Each of them dealt with the cold and the nightmares alone.

By the second night they were huddling together to keep the chill at bay, and by the third they were curling up together just because they could. Chloe was warm, so warm, and when Max pressed against her back and pressed her face into the space at the crook of her shoulder Chloe would sigh and lean into the touch.

Max probably didn't deserve to have Chloe, not when she'd let so many others die. Something about karma and retribution and all that—Blackwell didn't exactly have a philosophy course, but she was pretty sure you didn't just get to let hundreds of people die and walk off into the sunset afterwards. She _wanted_ Chloe, though—wanted to feel her, feel the way life thrummed through her skin. She wanted to hear Chloe's laughter and watch the way her mouth turned down when she was angry.

(She didn't regret saving Chloe. Sometimes Max remembered the path of destruction the storm had left behind it and thought she ought to, but more than anything else she was just so glad to see Chloe alive.)

Tonight, as Max settled down, Chloe wrapped her arms around her and pulled her closer. For a moment she thought of pulling away—Chloe's soul buzzed with worry and restlessness and a desperate need to act, and Max _really_ didn't want to have this conversation right now—but she didn't want Chloe to let her go. 

Instead, she pressed her head against the seat and did her very best to radiate exhaustion. “What?”

Chloe huffed out a breath and poked Max's cheek. “C'mon, you feel so grumpy. I just want to talk.”

“Yeah, and I don't.”

“Only 'cause you're scared I might have a good argument.”

Max couldn't actually deny that, but she rolled her eyes anyway. Chloe would be able to sense the exasperation behind the gesture even if she couldn't actually _see_ it. “When did you turn into a psychologist, huh?”

“Dr. Price, at your service.” Chloe laughed quietly. “Specialties in trauma and time travel.”

“Not sure you'll have much of a practice going if you've only got one patient.”

Chloe's confidence, reflected through the mark, was the only thing keeping her calm enough to joke around like this. She could feel her heart hammering a frantic beat against her ribcage.

“Hmm… well, I'll just have to milk the patient I've got, then. Get those stacks, retire early, you know the drill.” After a moment of silence, she pulled Max in closer. “Seriously, though, what's wrong? You're hella freaked out right now.”

“I don't…” Max shuddered. She wanted to keep quiet, but there was no easy way to lock her emotions behind an apathetic face anymore. Not with Chloe around. “I don't think it'll work, going back.”

“Well… I mean, we can test, can't we? Not like we just have to rush in—there's time to think about this.”

Thinking about time travel, thinking she could plan it and understand it, was what had gotten Max into so much trouble in the first place.

“It's not the same, though,” she argued. “It's gotta be the marks—right? Before you could never remember what I did when I changed the past, and now suddenly the rules are all different; the marks are the only thing that's changed.” The marks and the storm, inextricably linked. Just like her and Chloe. “We don't know if it'll work for anything more complicated than what we did earlier today, or if it'll even _work_ if I go back to before we got out souls all connected.”

“But we can test, that's the _point_ —”

“And I can make things even worse than they already are? No thanks.” Guilt hung heavy in her stomach, like being crushed under some great weight. “You don't understand, Chloe, everything I did only made things worse. Kate, Jefferson, the storm, the accident… I couldn't fix it. Any of it.”

“You saved me,” Chloe said. In the darkness she was nothing more than a shadow pressed against Max's back. Her lungs inflated and deflated, her heart kept a steady beat, her soul burned brighter than any fire Max could imagine. “You kept me from—from fucking _bleeding to death_ on the floor of some old shitty bathroom. Doesn't that count for anything?”

“Yes!” Max snapped, “it does!” It was impossible not stay calm now, with Chloe poking at every scabbed-over wound. “Don't you _get it_? If I go back into that photo and you don't remember all of this… if I change even the _slightest_ thing when I'm rescuing you… all of this would disappear.” She tried not to let her voice waver as she said, “I don't want to lose you again.”

Chloe winced. “Max, I—shit, I'm sorry. I didn't want to scare you.”

“It's not your fault.” Max tried to reach up and rub at her eyes, but Chloe's arms were still wrapped too tightly around her. 

When it all came down to it, Max could be the only one to blame. She'd stood by and watched Chloe die by Nate's hand and then again by Jefferson's. She'd been stupid and giddy and overwhelmed with the knowledge that she could make any of the consequences disappear, that none of this really _meant_ anything.

And then Kate. And the world where Chloe suffered even more than here. And then Jefferson and Rachel Amber and the gallery and the storm, the consequences hitting one after the other with all the force of a bullet.

Chloe reached out in the darkness and wrapped her hand around the raised skin of Max's soulmark. “I won't—I won't be an ass about it anymore. But… for what it's worth, I think it could work. It wouldn't just be you; it would be us, _together_. I'm sure of it.”

“And if you're wrong?”

“If I'm wrong, it'll still be okay. I mean, come on, it's _you_.”

Max didn't know what to do with the unshakeable faith she could feel radiating from Chloe. “I don't deserve that,” she muttered. “I didn't do anything.”

“You saved me.” Chloe paused a moment, then added, “you helped me find out what really happened to Rachel Amber. You tried to save Kate, when no one else even cared.”

“Like it matters now.” Kate was dead, Rachel Amber was dead, and good luck getting justice when all the evidence had been turned into rubble or washed away. No one but them would ever know the truth of what had happened at Blackwell.

“It matters to me,” Chloe said. “Everything you've done. It all mattered to me.”

Max felt like she might be shaking. She took a steadying breath, then another, and then pulled one hand free so she could wrap her fingers around Chloe's mark in turn. It felt almost alive under her touch—vibrant and pulsing with an energy that matched Chloe's will.

There was no one else like Chloe in the world. Max couldn't have stopped herself from loving her if she'd tried.

“We can test,” she said, trying not to sound petrified and hopeful all at once, “but if it doesn't work it doesn't work, okay?”

Chloe actually _laughed_ , the first time Max had heard the noise out of her since the storm. She pressed her forehead against the back of Max's neck; Max could feel the buoyancy of her sudden joy lifting them both. “Have I ever told you you're the best?”

“A few times, maybe. I could always stand to hear it more, though.” Max smiled.

This wouldn't—couldn't—work. She couldn't even imagine it ending in anything other than abject failure.

That didn't mean she wasn't going to hope.

–

A month later and a week earlier, depending on how you counted it, Max stood in the corner of a grimy student bathroom and tried her best not to hyperventilate.

The bluish mark was still there. Was that a good sign, or was it just some useless splotch now? She thought perhaps she could feel _something_ through it, but maybe that was just her own wishful thinking. Hard to hear anything over the sound of her own panic.

The door opened: Nathan Prescott, right on cure. Muttering to himself in fear and desperate pride. Max had heard this speech at least a dozen times before. It always ended the same way, unless Max stepped out early—then it just ended with her getting shot.

The door opened once more, and over the squeaking of the hinges Max caught the bone-deep sensation of _nervous-panicked-can't-believe-this_. 

Someone else's worries in her head. Someone else's soul tied to hers.

Max stepped out from her alcove. She didn't care if she got shot, didn't care if she had to rewind this moment a dozen times. She needed to _know_.

She stepped into the open, her marked wrist held out like a talisman. “Chloe,” she said.

Nate stepped back, suddenly panicked. “What the _hell_?”

Nothing about him mattered, because Chloe—Chloe was right there, her hair and face and voice all so achingly familiar it hurt. It seemed as if they'd been separated for years instead of… a few minutes? A few weeks? Time was way too confusing to try and count these days.

Chloe smiled at her from across the tiny room. “See, Max? I told you it would work.”


End file.
